Remember your begin yet stay in the present.
Go diving. Go diving, emotions and experiences floating again. The fascination and the fear, the freedom and the constrains. Go underwater and peek into the last unknown, strap yourself to a cumbersome gear, learn to move again. Go diving and start anew. Go diving indeed. Be underwater with beginners and be back when you begun. Yesterday my friend keep hitting the back of her head against a too highly placed bottle, and I saw myself, 9 years old stealing the cylinder of my father and jumping into a swimming pool, to hit the back of my head the same way. Should have remember before, I guess. So it is not only the magic of start your friends in an adventure that has given you unforgettable moments for decades, but also the responsibility of bringing your experience alive, to use every hard learned lesson, every time. Go diving, teach diving. Get more people into this world, still unknown, still rewarding. By all means, do that, don’t keep the oceans to yourself. But be aware, that an instructor gotta be ten times better diver than a diver. Not necessarily better at explaining things, which is what the flawed instructor courses nowadays teach. An instructor gotta be ten times better diver. When your student looses her trim and you keep yours and compensate hers to keep the depth. Or when a new fish crosses your path and she goes chasing it at full speed, when you have to catch her and explain, underwater, that fishes are better on their own, without our clumsy presence, that underwater we are guests that don’t want to disturb. Or when your student signals you, clumsily, his pain or distress, and is fully your task to stay calm to calm him, to remind him to clear his sinuses or his mask, to disentangle himself from that fishing line, to reach him the manometer and let him realize that there is yet plenty of air. For all this and much more is that you need to be a better diver. To teach diving is to remember your begin, being in the now.
Equipment matter
So you are a diver, and have been diving for years without end. You own your gear, and know it at levels of detail that compete with the maker himself. Expended unbelievable amount of time choosing between a computer or another, between a horseshoe or a donut wing. And most likely you are passionate about your choice. You can defend it against every other diver like you. Yet diving keeps evolving, and most likely your gear is already some years old, and has small flaws that you have learned to solve, flaws that you don’t think about anymore. That’s the gear that is being used by your friend right now, in his first or second time underwater. After having explained what the kidney dump from a wing is, and how you use it, you got your friend trying to trim. So you see that the side of the wing with the dump is indeed emptied by your friend, but not the other. You remember that when you bought this wing you realize that flaw in the first dive, and solve it with a little wiggle to distribute the air. But how are you going to explain that to your beginner right now? So gear matters indeed, and is not only about making yours available to your students. To your students you need to provide gear that is easy to understand, that is easy to appropriate by themselves. It is neither a matter of basic versus advanced gear (as many wrongly designed courses nowadays will have you, learning to use a flawed designed and hard to trim BCD-jacket, to have you a year down the road learn, again and anew, how to use a wing). Taking rebreathers and dry suits out of the equation, it is hard to signal gear that is advanced and can only be used after having mastered a basic version of it. Today the advanced against basic is just a business model from some companies, to make you consume twice. So the gear for a beginner is not about being basic, but it is about being simple. Beginner gear should be gear that requires few handlings to master. And if you come to think about it, that is also what advanced gear is about. And there, there in the few handlings for control your gear that you are about to teach your students is where your quality as diver and instructor will shine. Choosing equipment that is simple, that is simple to learn, that has fewer failing points than others, equipment that your student can own in her mind easily, equipment that will give her security, and peace of mind.
Surf the wave
Once upon a time, the place of the instructor was the shore. From it, people said, the better informed leader could coordinate all what should happen, and leave the minute to minute work to the dive master, in the water with the students. Mighty and all knowing, the instructor saw people sinking and remained above. Such attitude survived form many years, and taught many people to dive. Even today you will see water coordinators ashore, with paper and pen, asking for times and air consumption, in a futile attempt at showing control and coordination… after the dive happened. We don’t need to be that person anymore. It is not only that each of us should monitor our own air and be self sufficient under water. It is neither the fact that in reality, besides those artificial “club dives” nobody that goes diving ask somebody else to stay at the shore for vague security concerns. It is that to teach is to do. We are not anymore those classic and authoritarian teachers, that expected their students to learn everything said, and apply it outside the classroom. Not anymore. We have learned that people actually learn better when there is a clear example, when they dive at the side of somebody that does what she should do, that is easy to copy. So we have actually learn that the best teacher is the companion, and not the superior. Actually, companions are the ones that actually enjoy a teaching dive. Yesterday, when my friend squeezed my arm hard, very hard, at seeing a school of Perca fluviatilis under a dark platform, or when I could see his eyes dilating at recognizing the shape of a wreck creating itself as we approached it. Being a companion is surfing again that old wave that got you under water, that same wave that is telling your friends today that underwater is where we belong. Surf that wave and go underwater!
